Modern cellular networks are evolving rapidly. Over the past few years, with the advent of smart mobile devices, a huge increase of data consuming applications, and a manifold increase in the capacity of cellular network bandwidth, users in cellular networks have become extremely data hungry. Traffic from mobile video alone is projected to exceed current total mobile traffic. Moreover, video streaming services are expected to constitute a major portion of the mobile video traffic. Together, a wide range of video delivery services and a surge in the quality of videos account for this phenomenon. As more devices become mobile, demand by users for video delivered to their mobile devices is expected to increase.
It is noted rapid growth in video traffic is posing service assurance challenges to CSPs. Service degradation issues, if unresolved in a timely manner, may result in subscriber churn. As content delivery models move away from streaming distribution over private networks to Web-based delivery of files over the public Internet, referred to as Over-The-Top (OTT) delivery, traditional streaming video paradigms are constantly modified to support new delivery protocols, e.g., Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Live Streaming. Even in scenarios where video is played using OTT delivery, the end user expectation is that OTT service should work seamlessly irrespective of the medium and device it is being consumed on. Typically, service providers need to ensure that a given video stream is fully functional and operational across all stages of end-to-end content delivery to the end users.
Video data has characteristics that differ from characteristics of many other types of data, such as email or data used with web browsing. Video data, in particular, is consumed according to specific timing. If video data is not timely delivered to its destination, a video session playing back the video will freeze. In this case, impact on the Quality of Experience for the video session is much greater than what a similar delay may cause with other types of data. However, video quality can be degraded at any stage from video production to end user consumption. Thus, to ensure end user satisfaction the CSPs typically need to proactively monitor and fix the issues almost in real time to prevent video service degradation.